I’m doing a few performances upcoming and I asked a couple of my former songwriting students to sing with me. It’s fun to have someone else sing your song. Feels like simultaneously being the sideman and the headliner. One of them is religious and I can’t help myself, always tempting to ask a religious person how they live their life of belief because I believe all the religions are man made. Sometimes this makes for impossible lines drawn in the sand and I avoid such discussions with my more hostile acquaintances (hello Gordie what are you doing here?) but sometimes it is just fascinating like earlier today after rehearsal when I mentioned to her how incredible it is that the Earth is millions of years old and yet people have only been around only 50,000 years. It’s more fitting to say the Earth belongs to the dinosaurs than to us. I didn’t expect her response “I don’t believe there ever were dinosaurs”. I couldn’t process that. What about the skeletons? She replied she thinks it is man made. This didn’t compute and I started explaining how her position made no sense until realizing we were both doing the same thing, claiming the flaw was a story invented by people. The show is next Saturday at the Social Capitol Theatre 154 Danforth (broadview station).